A city steeped in it’s own history and a deep respect for the cultural arts, Paris has also had a romance with New York – style graffiti since the early 1980s and has a thriving Street Art scene of it’s own making today. In yet another example of institutional recognition of the contribution of graffiti and Street Art, the city hosted an exemplary tribute to graffiti history two years ago with “Graffiti, Born in the Streets,” an exhibition that took over the gallery space of the Fondazione Cartier. The popular show included the building’s façade and the surrounding garden as well as large scale photos of tags and pieces displayed in the Paris Metro on buses, and of course, trains.
Recently photographer Er1cBl41r did a small survey of the Street Art scene in Paris and shares some images here. In this collection we can see that the techniques of stencils (many one-color), wheatpastes, direct painting, illustration, and of course the glued tiles of local street artist Invader are in many locations around the city.
Street Artist and burly bear Veng came out of hibernation this spring with a roaring hunger for walls and so far he’s foraged plenty of them in BKLN. From the breezy shores of La Isla Conejo to the rusty thickets of Bushwick, the borough of Brooklyn has a few hundred feet more of aerosol paint since this guy poked his head out of the cave during the thaw.
Just this week we found him placidly smacking his choppers and savoring the last taste of lunch while sitting on a sidewalk and surveying the sweeping Veng Vista across the street; almost one entire block length wall that he’s completing this weekend for the big Bushwick Open Studios 2011.
Now in it’s 5th year and produced by the volunteer army Arts in Bushwick, the studios and streets are fair game for visitors and artists of all stripes and abilities. Each year it is entertaining and educational to witness who’s moved on, who’s still hanging on, and who’s just arrived to claim credit for it all. Veng is one of the hangers-on; in fact one of the starter-uppers when it comes to Street Art here.
As we reported yesterday, Factory Fresh Gallery has two entries in this year’s festival, a veritable double bill of Indoor and Outdoor. Inside the gallery is “Surrealism,” perhaps in honor of the British-born Mexican Surrealist Master Leonora Carrington who passed away May 25th or perhaps to acknowledge Surrealism’s many currents running through pop culture and street culture today.
The Outside portion showcases the “Bushwick Art Park”, FF’s entry to the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas, which proposes to build an art park on this very block of Vandevoort Place where Veng is painting. No stranger to surrealism himself, Veng often depicts his characters in other-worldly portraits with birds as hats and hats as boats and intricately detailed scenes nested within scenes.
These process shots from Thursday show him trampling along on the immense wall and by Friday he told us he’d be done. You’ll need to check this one yourself to verify. While bears can move fast sometimes, they also tend to favor long naps.
1a. John Burgerman crosses Wburg Bridge with Bananas on head
1. BOS 2011 – Bushwick Open Studios This Weekend
2. 3rdEye(Sol)ation
3. “Surrealism” and “Bushwick Art Park”
4. “Stay Gold” at Curbs & Stoops Active Space
5. “Fine-Ass Art” at Kings County Bar
6. GILF! Pop Up
7. New Ludo “Green Beery” (VIDEO)
We really are so damn lucky to be here in NYC. The cultural offerings are always varied, plentiful, inspiring and in many cases FREE. Of course the rent is too high and your bedroom can accomodate a bed or a dresser but not both, but when you hit the streets the cultural stimulation never stops.
For example, newly arrived Noo Yawker Jon Burgerman practiced his good posture and accentuated his down jacket this spring by traipsing through the streets and across the Williamsburg Bridge balancing bananas on his head.
From Jon’s most recent and exhausting email, “Sometimes the things you see (on the street) are rather lovely, like the blossom on the trees and people outside drinking coffee and graffiti so fresh the paint is still wet.”
BOS 2011 – Bushwick Open Studios This Weekend
Hats off to the BOS crew who have laid the foundations for the new artists and curators to grow upon.
BOS ’11 – Bushwick Open Studios is in it’s fifth year and many newly minted blogs and curators are discovering this once desolate industrial pit. It’s still a pit, but at least it’s not so desolate — it also helps that high rents elsewhere have created this steady river of people flowing out of the L train Morgan stop.
Speaking of which;
IMPORTANT TRAVEL ADVISORY: The L train will NOT be running between Manhattan and Brooklyn for the entire weekend. Take the JMZ trains instead and you’ll still get dropped right in the middle of it.
Below are our picks, and while our focus is primarily on Street Art artists and events, please hit the BOS site to take a look at the complete list of events and shows:
Jason Mamarella’s curated a group show featuring Billi Kid, Peru Ana Ana Peru, ASVP, Mike Die, Jos-L, dint wooer krsna, Quel Beast, Septerhed, Choice Royce, Kosbe, QRST, Trixtr Rabbit, Bankrupt Slut, CCB, Wisher 914, ZamArt opens this Friday at 3rd Eye(sol)ation 7-10 pm.
For more information, location and hours about this show click on the link below:
SURREALISM:
twenty artists from the neighborhood wrestle their unconscious.
An exhibition at Factory Fresh for Bushwick Open Studios curated by Jason Andrew and Ali Ha.
Jim Avignon, Kevin Curran, Ryan Michael Ford, Paul D’Agostino, Ben Godward, Tamara Gonzales, Andrew Hurst, Rebecca Litt, Francesco Longnecker, Norman Jabaut, J.P. Marin, Brooke Moyse, Garry Nichols, Patricia Satterlee, Pufferella, Skewville, John Sunderland, Sweet Toof, Marjorie Van Cura & Veng
BUSHWICK ART PARK
A one day community event June 4th, 1-7pm
Located at the proposed Bushwick Art Park on Vandervoort Place
Factory Fresh is sponsoring a street event with art and murals to showcase their entry on this year’s Festival of Ideas that the New Museum produced and staged at the Bowery early in May.
Kings County has hosted a number of street artists for shows at this dark haunt for about four years and tonight a few more get their shine on. You may also coax a a go-go girl or boy onto the bar to add to the visual candy on the walls. Man, that’s some fine-ass art.
Gilf! Pop Up Gallery
107 Forrest Ave btw Flushing Ave and Central Ave (across from
English Kills Gallery)
Friday 7-9
Sat 12-9, opening reception from 7-9
Sun 12-7
New Ludo “Green Beery” (VIDEO)
The latest video from Parisian Street Artist Ludo:
Urban Viking timberwolf Dennis McNett just returned to Brooklyn from a gothic crusade across the US invoking the imagery of mythic god monsters and engaging the imaginations of the ever-legion artistic minions who follow him. The Street Artist, performance art director, professor, and proto-historic re-enactor knows how to engage the fun loving child and the warrior beast within students and artists alike. Whether invoking the Latino folk beast the Chupakabra, Nordic mythology, or McNett’s own mystical Wolfbats and Wolf-eagles, the 3-month tour successfully summoned the awestruck to participate in a loosely guided theater and public performance art wherever it went.
” The students UW each made helmets, axes, swords, and also helped to build the frost giant, the blood ice castle, and Wolfbat Sled. After processioning through State Street we went out onto the frozen lake to conjure the great frost giant Ymir from his blood ice castle and we had a ceremony of battle” – Dennis McNett
Leaving the major metropolitan centers to the effete and coddled lily-livered mama’s boys and girls, Dennis trudges into the nether regions of a vast continent to 10 outlying wolf settlements including Vermillion, SD, Bellingham,WA, Madison, WI, Jacksonville. FL, St. Louis, MO, Kansas City, MO, Emporia Kansas, Wichita, KA, Omaha, NE, Lubbock, TX, and Odessa, TX. At each encampment, McNett’s imagination and enthralling storytelling persuades locals to participate in parades, prop making, and to summon the roaring grunt from deep within all mythic monsters to slay adversaries and chest pound with victory.
By now McNett’s mask making and heavily carved contour lines have mutated to include everything they intersect with, and participants are game to call forth the roar of the inner wolfbat and light stuff on fire, with a torch in one hand and a shank of grizzled wilderbeast in the other. During the tour the McNett adventures involved sacrificial burnings, fortune telling, piñatas, the guttural roaring of metal bands, custom trains, chupakabras, Viking vessels, blood ice castles, and of course, UFOs.
“This event involved a lot. The guys at Escapist allowed me to have a show of work at their space – so that was the end spot for the nights chaos. We built a Wolfbat War Vessel that started at the Inkubator where there were two alien pinatas built at Wichita State Univeristy. Sedlec Ossuary (a metal band from Topeka) was set up inside the vessel and students from KCAI, Emporia State, and Wichita State showed up in Wolfbat warrior regalia.
The local crowd from the First Friday art walk gathered as we slayed the aliens and proceeded down the street with the band growling. The street was overrun and traffic had to move at the pace of the Wolfbat mob. After making our way to Escapist we slayed 3 more alien pinatas, burned a sacrificial war eagle in the street, and lit off tons of fireworks. Thank you Deluxe, Vans, and Volcom for filling the pinatas and the support. Thank you Ericka, James, and Miguel and Wichita State, KCAI, and Emporia state students for showing up and getting down” – Dennis McNett
“Omaha is known as the “Gate City of the West” because it is where Union Pacific Railroad built and started the first transcontinental railroad, making it a major hub leading west by train. For the my visit to the University of Nebraska, Omaha we launched the first ever Wolfbat Railway. I built a print covered train steam engine and all the students made cowboy hats. On the last day we paraded the train to the new business center where it will live” – Dennis McNett
“The Chupakabra have joined with the Wolfbat in order to track the Jackalope and reclaim their territories in west Texas. The Jackalope have come down from Wyoming and have been over breeding the lands and pushing the Chupakabra out. Once the head Jackalope heard the Chupakabra had put a hit out for his life he fled. Unknowingly the travel agent booking his flight to Stonehenge was actually working for the Wolfbat and booked the flight to the Stonehenge replica in Odessa, TX where the clan are awaiting his arrival” – Dennis McNett
Specter at The Festival of Ideas for the Bushwick Art Park 2011
BUSHWICK ART PARK
A one day community event June 4th, 1-7pm
Located at the proposed Bushwick Art Park on Vandervoort Place
Ribbon Cutting Ceremony with Council Member Diana Reyna at 2:30pm
The Bushwick Art Park hosted by Trust Art, Norte Maar and Factory Fresh, featuring works previously showcased at
the Festival of Ideas in May 2011, expands into a Sculpture Garden at the proposed Bushwick Art Park site on
Vandevoort Place. We invite guests to enjoy the fresh air and local views surrounded by outdoor sculptures.
Sculptures by Bast, Leon Reid IV, Specter, Skewville,
Ben Godward, Infinity, Garry Nichols and El Celso.
Political Podium by Seth Aylmer.
New Bushwick Art Park mural by Veng.
The famed Barracuda Wall plays host to the Street Art conversation in LA once again with this ironic installation from Cyrcle and Muska, captured here by photographer Carlos Gonzales. Post No Bills, for readers who live outside of Metropolis, is a standard warning that appears on the walls of construction sites to discourage outdoor advertisers from plastering their entreaties for you to purchase deodorant, electronic devices, hair straightening goo, and cruises to Killarney.
Naturally, poster companies routinely ignore the admonition and plaster thousands of ads every year upon them despite the warnings and usually with indemnity.
Sandwiched between the ads you’ll find the Street Artist, whose voice jumps out from the commercial cacophony and this installation is a commentary on the claim commercial entities have on public space, while the tiny public voice is often squeezed out. While some real estate developers have actually hired Street Artists and others in recent years to adorn their construction sites with their work, the majority of these lots simply are a toggled message of “Post No Bills” one day and hoochie mamas in thongs shilling energy drinks the next.
In this installation Street Artists Cyrcle and Muska playfully draw attention to these signs and cast them as fine art installation, a deliberate postmodern repetitive rhythmic visual chant for pedestrians and drivers in the city to enjoy.
We’re creating an open and inclusive event that benefits the neighborhood by sharing artistic projects and encouraging community interaction and dialogue. BOS brings the neighborhood’s thousands of artists and performers out into the streets and in view of each other, other community residents, and the general public.
About Arts in Bushwick
Our Mission
Arts in Bushwick is an all volunteer organization that serves and engages artists and other neighborhood residents through creative accessibility and community organizing. It is our goal to create an integrated and sustainable neighborhood, and to bring together all Bushwick residents and stakeholders to counter development-driven displacement.
Our History
Arts In Bushwick was founded in the fall of 2007, as a result of grassroots efforts to produce the 2007 Bushwick Open Studios festival. The organization was founded by a group of roughly fifteen local artists and community organizers, most of whom were involved in planning the 2007 Bushwick Open Studios, and has continued to operate on an all-volunteer, non-hierarchical, break-even basis to today, the fifth annual Bushwick Open Studios we have produced. Arts In Bushwick maintains a completely open structure, inviting all community members to bring their ideas and to participate in collaboratively producing the organization and its activities.
To learn more about all the events, participating artists and venues for BOS 2011 please click on the link below:
Brooklyn based Street Artist Over Under opens his first solo show in “Building on Building” opening at XYandZ Gallery in Minneapolis, transporting his architectural fever dreams to Minnesota for a hot minute. It’s all about relationships.
Artists who run in the streets of dense cities have a special relationship with buildings, seeing them as potential canvas, laboratory, love affair, and sometimes their perdition. In Over Under’s case, the very structures he was painting and pasting upon got recycled through his mind as worthy of caricature and portrait.
Approximately a year ago when the artist’s prolific output was hard to miss, his fascination with our built environment went on a full REM cycle with a continual metamorphose of architectural elements bending and bundled together with lyrically disembodied limbs. During his nearly two weeks in Minneapolis making work with his buddies Broken Crow, the arms and legs continue to poke into and out of roofs, windows and walls like so many orifices and protuberances entangled in one stately mass.
Passersby here are sometimes astonished, and filled with questions. Is he exploring the relationship between space and personal relationships or is he examining the construct/construction that creates inside and outside, or is he reacting to the ongoing overtaking of Williamsburg and Bushwick real estate by dullard developers? Or is he just in love?
And what about this iconic flying plane with a stream-of-consciousness line of haiku diary entry arching over it? Is it a bird? Is it graffiti, a tag, Street Art or vandalism? Maybe these questions are at play because Over Under is still playing with them, or maybe because there are not clear answers. To us it’s all part of the conversation on the street, which never stops. Tonight, however, the conversation goes in through the doors as Over Under brings the buildings and bridges and foundations and superstructures and rolldown gates and lithe limbs inside for the night. We’ll see what sticks out.
New work from Specter speaks of his desire to not repeat himself, a quality distinguishing the New Guard of street artists, whose work is highly individual and hand made, from those of the recent past.
The Brooklyn based Street Artist generally denounces the culture of repetition in street art, and takes the practice of making multiples under careful consideration. His precise handmade wheat-pastes and paintings often highlight the individual, many of them regular folks he’s met on the street – and you will usually only see one of them.
Right now he’s been toying with retooling his work and recently in Chicago he created new stuff that appears to be a repetition of himself without really putting up the same piece twice. The first piece is from his “If I Saw You in Heaven” series, and the second is from his “Window Project”. Says the artist “It plays with repetition in multiple ways, but on my own terms.”
To expand on the theme, his new show “Repeat Offender” at Pawn Works in Chicago continues the repetition, where he’s showing his work in new tints and configurations, sort of sidebusting himself.
College student Derek Dipietro fell for some stencils by French Street Artist C215 on his recent trip to Amsterdam. The stenciled images are most likely of people who live in the area, as C215 likes to photograph neighborhoods’ residents, frequently the marginalized among them. The artist considers his stencils to be a gift to the community, and a way for a locality to retain its individual character. Dipietro was so impressed by what he found that he began to play with and alter his photos using image software called Aperture, and in the process began to create new interpretations.
From working with C215 to create his most recent monograph, we know that the artist encourages photographers to interpret his work in any way they wish, so he no doubt would be pleased to see this youth from North Carolina State University learning how to tweak photos of his work. Since we like to celebrate the creative spirit, we’re excited anytime somebody wants to share his or her creations too.
It’s also part of technological and cultural literacy for us all to understand the new tools that are employed to alter imagery throughout the world today, and to appreciate and respect the power that we all wield with creative mouse clicking. Similarly, we have to consider our responsibility to attribute authorship and how to protect it, and when. In the wrong hands, an artist’s work can be abused or appropriated for profit, which is where the grey areas get defined.
Keep up your studies Derek and thanks for sharing your work and your interpretations of the work of C215.
Elfo is a graffiti writer and social commentator whose work intentionally sidesteps traditional notions of style or technical lettering. This …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
